A security expert says Canadians should take with a grain of salt a U.S. study that suggests new security measures at airports, such as x-ray screening of baggage, are not improving safety.
The study by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health suggests the only real effect of the new measures may be greater delays and wait times at airports as travellers are forced to remove their belts and shoes and as security officers confiscate a long list of banned items.
But Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a security consultant and former CSIS agent, says it's not quite that simple. Looking at the big picture, he said, shows security is improving.
"That, I have a little bit of difficulty with, because we just need to go from an empirical perspective, compared to what it was before -- and I'm talking way before 9/11 when there was no security at all, so in the '60s and the '70s -- where there was a lot of hijacking and bombing," Juneau-Katsuya told CTV's Canada AM.
"Now we don't have a lot of hijacking and no bombing at all of that nature. But have we exceeded what we need to do? That's a very pertinent question."
He suggested there needs to be a careful balance struck between the massive amount of money being spent on security in the U.S. and Canada and actually ensuring that those measures are making a difference.
But Juneau-Katsuya also said it's difficult, if not impossible, to measure the number of potential attacks the new security efforts may have prevented.
"Bingo. That's the difficult element," he said.
"That's the portion of trying to assess something that has not happened. That's all the challenge that you have ... when you have crime preventative measures. How do you measure the effectiveness of crime prevention? It's the same thing here to a certain extent."
The Transportation Security Administration told researchers doing the study that the need to implement new security measures quickly, superseded the usefulness of evaluating those procedures.
In other words, the measures are necessary and valuable even if they haven't been proven to work.
The administration pointed out that 13 million banned items were intercepted in one year under the current rules. But the researchers who did the study noted that the majority of those items were lighters.
Juneau-Katsuya suggested Canada can improve its efforts. He said the U.S. Senate Committee on Security is an effective body, and Canada needs a similar watchdog for security.
He also said greater consistency is needed in the way security measures are enforced across Canada.
"There are places where they don't care too much about your belt, they don't care too too much about your shoes. Other places you almost strip down. So there's an issue of consistency," Juneau-Katsuya said.
